Wednesday, September 09, 2009

WE REMEMBER ANDREW ANTHONY ABATE

I am honored to be a part of his project again. Please be sure to visit Project 2,996 to read about so many others that lost their lives on September 11, 2001. ANDREW ABATE

Blogger Modern Redneck CL wrote a beautiful tribute to Mr. Abate in 2006 and I’d like to share it here. “Andrew Anthony Abate, age 37 of Melville, NY, died tragically on September 11, 2001 during the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. He was a bond trader with Cantor Fitzgerald, World Trade Center, NY.

Vincent Abate and his “little” brother, Andrew, could never stand to be apart from each other for too long. Even at family gatherings, her two only children were inseparable, Elaine Abate said. “Christmas Eve was their favorite time,” she said. “They loved it because we were all together.”

Andrew Abate, 37, of Melville, and his wife, Carolyn, would often take drinks and a few steaks to Vincent’s weekend home on the Jersey Shore. “They both loved the time they spent at that house,” their mother said. Warm weekend days would be spent barbecuing on Vincent’s grill or sunbathing at the beach. But inevitably, the weekends would end, and Andrew would travel back home to Melville, and Vincent, 40, would head home to Brooklyn.

The brothers would wake up on Monday mornings and head to work. They both had offices on the 105th floor of Tower One. “Vincent started working at Cantor Fitzgerald pretty much straight out of college,” their mother said. “Andrew has been working there for about three years now. They were always together. They worked together and played together.”

Vincent and Andrew were born in Brooklyn, where they both attended St. Francis Cabrini Grammar School. “Even when they were kids, they did everything together,” their mother said. They attended Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn, where they played football and baseball.

During the summers, the brothers were part of a swim team in Freeport. College separated the two, with Andrew graduating from the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University in 1987 after his brother had graduated from Ithaca College three years earlier. But they would soon find themselves working “side by side at Cantor Fitzgerald,” Elaine Abate said.

The Abate family spread out geographically over the past few years, she said. She and her husband, Alfred Abate, traveled between their Boca Raton, Fla., and New Hyde Park homes, but they always found time for family gatherings. The brothers were last heard from the weekend before Sept. 11, their mother said, when they phoned her to “say hi and find out how things were.”

Sitting in Andrew’s living room, Elaine Abate had a comforting thought about her sons: “The one thing I want people to know is that they were together as much as they could be.”

Thank you for your beautiful tribute and I hope it is okay that I share it here today.